The commodification and co-optation of stories—of individuals and communities—is something I have been thinking about lately at both a personal and professional level. Personal, as I reflect on the various critiques of my medical memoir, Catching Homelessness: A Nurse’s Story of Falling Through the Safety Net (Berkeley: She Writes Press, 2016). And professional, as I walk through the medical center where I work and notice the larger-than-life patient testimonials (read: advertisements) for the medical care they have received—and read the various gut-wrenching personal stories of people who will be adversely affected by the current Republican-led efforts to “reform” our healthcare system.
In addition, I am thinking about this issue as I finish final writing and editing of my next book manuscript, Soul Stories: Voices from the Margins. The following is an excerpt from the chapter/essay “The Body Remembers”:
“Telling the story of trauma—of survival—may have the capacity for at least aiding in healing at the individual level, but then there is the added danger, once shared, of it being appropriated and misused by more powerful political or fundraising causes. Stories can be stolen. Arthur Frank calls these hijacked narratives. “Telling one’s own story is good, but it is never inherently good, and the story is never entirely one’s own.”
An intriguing example of a stolen story is the one included in Rebecca Skloot’s narrative nonfiction book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which tells the story of the “stolen” cervical cancer cells from an impoverished and poorly educated black woman in Baltimore in the 1950s—cells that scientists at Johns Hopkins University Hospital subsequently profited from through the culturing and selling of HeLa cells—cells which killed Henrietta Lacks and cells which neither she nor her family members consented to being used and profited from. Skloot, a highly educated white woman, has profited from the use of the Lacks’ family story, although she has set up a scholarship fund for the Lacks’ family members. I am reminded of the proverb that Vanessa Northington Gamble shares in her moving essay, “Subcutaneous Scars,” about her experience of racism as a black physician. Dr. Gamble’s grandmother, a poor black woman in Philadelphia, used to admonish her, “The three most important things that you own in this world are your name, your word, and your story. Be careful who you tell your story to.” (From “Subcutaneous Scars” Narrative Matters, Health Affairs, 2000, 19(1):164-169.)
- See also my previous blog post “The Commodification and Co-optation of Patient Narratives” from February 11, 2011. Re-reading this blog post, I remembered that it was deemed too controversial and critical by a university librarian to include on our narrative medicine university-sponsored blog site (now inactive—the library blog, not the librarian).
JOSEPHINE ENSIGN 